Prominent art collector John Axelrod, strolling Saturday morning on the Commonwealth Avenue Mall, died in a targeted attack by a Back Bay man who sought out the victim, accelerated as he drove onto the mall, and deliberately ran over Axelrod and his dog, authorities said Monday.
“This was not a motor vehicle accident,” prosecutor Ursula Knight said as William Haney Jr., appearing dazed and disheveled, was arraigned in Boston Municipal Court. “It was deliberate and premeditated murder.”
A not-guilty plea for first-degree murder and animal cruelty was entered for Haney, 42, who stood motionless as Judge Joseph Griffin ordered him held without bail and transported to Bridgewater State Hospital for psychiatric evaluation.
Haney’s attorney said outside the courtroom that his client has struggled for most of his adult life with serious mental illness, believed people were out to harm him, and might have mistaken Axelrod, 79, for someone else.
“I’m not aware of any evidence he knew of Mr. Axelrod,” said Keith Halpern, the defense attorney.
Prosecutors, however, said Axelrod’s death was not a random tragedy.
Before striking Axelrod, Knight said, Haney drove from his home on Marlborough Street, stopped a passerby, and asked “if he had seen an individual who was wearing a red jacket and with his dog.”
“He used a derogatory term in referring to the two of them,” Knight continued, “suggesting that there may have been some sort of prior history where he had encountered Mr. Axelrod and his dog.”
The passerby indicated that the person was just ahead, Knight said.
Haney drove a 2014 Toyota SUV to the location shortly after 8 a.m., pivoted onto the mall, and accelerated, “running the two of them over,” according to the prosecutor. A witness heard a loud bang as well as the sound of a yelping dog, which also died.
A woman walking with Axelrod at the time of the attack, Knight said, recalled that the suspect “very much directed his car and his attention to Mr. Axelrod and the dog.”
At his arraignment, Haney wore an untucked blue shirt over loose-fitting dark pants and white sneakers. Haney has no history of violence, his attorney said, and his family over the years has been “actively involved in trying to help him.”
Dr. Heather Jackson, a court psychologist, told the judge that Haney did not appear to understand the charges he faces. During her evaluation, Jackson added, Haney “was smiling, looking around the room constantly, as if he was hearing auditory hallucinations.”
After Haney allegedly struck Axelrod, Knight said, a witness provided authorities with his vehicle’s license plate number. Video surveillance at 8:13 a.m., shortly after the crash, showed Haney at a Dunkin’ Donuts at 1316 Beacon St.
“He was then seen removing what looked like a rope from the front grill of the SUV and tossing it in the direction of a garbage can,” Knight said. The object turned out to be a leash with the name of Axelrod’s dog.
Haney later drove to a service station in Brookline, asking staff if they could fix his vehicle’s front-end damage. They said they were not an auto-body shop and declined Haney’s request to store the SUV there, Knight said.
Haney abandoned the vehicle at a nearby intersection and met his brother, she said. The pair went to the Brookline police station about 9:10 a.m., where Haney’s brother told authorities his sibling had been in an accident, Knight added.
Halpern, Haney’s lawyer, did not oppose the request that Haney be held without bail. After the arraignment, Halpern said he hoped the state might reconsider its murder charge following the results of his evaluation at Bridgewater State Hospital. The next court hearing is scheduled for Jan. 23.
Jackson, the court psychologist, said Haney’s medication had been changed in August.
“Since that time,” she said, “his brother has indicated that he’s had a difficult time understanding the difference between reality and fantasy.”
When speaking with Haney, Jackson said, “he appeared quite disorganized at times. He expressed numerous paranoid delusions. While he denied auditory hallucinations, he appeared to be responding to stimuli throughout the evaluation.”
She said that even the court proceedings seemed a mystery to Haney, who Halpern said has worked at “menial jobs” such as shoveling snow.
“Despite numerous attempts to educate him, he does not know what he is being charged with,” the psychologist said, adding that Haney could not identify his attorney by name.
Axelrod was a longtime supporter of the Museum of Fine Arts and donated nearly 900 works to the museum, including several collections of 20th-century decorative arts from Europe and the United States.
In the Back Bay on Monday, Darwin Cordoba, Axelrod’s longtime partner, paged through a scrapbook thick with Axelrod’s many artworks and accomplishments.
“When I first met John in 1982, there was art everywhere in his house — all over the walls, the bathroom, the bedroom, the kitchen, the floor,” he smiled. “When I moved in, I learned to live with it all, and I learned so much more from him, too.”
Cordoba said Axelrod pushed local institutions to expand their view of American art — sometimes hard enough to ruffle feathers.
Together, he said, they founded a lecture series on Latin American art at the MFA and sponsored several shows to help open the museum to audiences that had been traditionally uneasy within its walls.
“A lot of Latino people felt like, well, can I go there?” Cordoba said. “They believed it was only for the elite. John was really committed to breaking down that barrier, to make sure more people were represented.”
Mildred Gonzalez, who said she is Cordoba’s cousin, said outside the courtroom that Axelrod “was very well-respected, very kind.”
“There are no words,” she added.
“You have to feel lots of empathy for people with mental health issues,” Gonzalez said, “and that’s what [Axelrod] would have felt — empathy.”
Former MFA director Matthew Teitelbaum called Axelrod’s death devastating “for those who loved him and for those close to him, personally and professionally.”
“I feel that particularly so because John had such a unique voice,” Teitelbaum said. “The circumstance of his passing is tragic, but the effect of this is that a unique voice has been stilled.”
Teitelbaum, who stepped down as director last year, recalled Axelrod as a passionate collector, a self-described outsider, whose tastes and interests were often ahead of the art world curve.
“Where he fit was by making real his sense that the outsider deserved a seat at the table,” he said. “His collecting combined the sense of being the outsider and pushing to get inside, married to an exquisite sense of judgment and taste that was grounded for him in learning.”
Largely self-taught, Axelrod was an early collector of works by Black artists, whom he felt were critical to a fuller telling of the story of American art.
In 2011, before many museums had prioritized collecting works by Black artists, the MFA acquired 67 works from Axelrod, including by Jacob Lawrence, Norman Lewis, Allan Rohan Crite, and Kerry James Marshall.
The acquisition, known as the John Axelrod Collection, was a game-changer for the museum, which had recently opened the Art of the Americas Wing.
Teitelbaum added that the acquisition, which occurred under his predecessor, Malcolm Rogers, included works by artists not previously represented in the museum’s collection.
All told, Axelrod donated to the museum over four decades, including a 2008 gift of nearly 400 pieces of American Modern design from the 1920s and ’30s. The gift, portions of which are displayed in a gallery named in Axelrod’s honor, established the MFA as a leader in the field.
Nonie Gadsden, the museum’s senior curator of American decorative arts and sculpture, worked with Axelrod on many projects, including the 2008 gift.
“I learned very quickly never to question John’s eye,” she said. “He was always ahead of the museums and the curators and even the marketplace. He just had a way of identifying important objects.”
She recalled how she spent days at his Back Bay condo, where Axelrod had offered the museum anything it wanted from his modern design collection.
“You never knew what you’re going to find,” she recalled. “His cupboards didn’t have cereal and canned goods. His cupboards had modern silver and amazing other treasures.”
Though Axelrod never formally joined the museum’s board of trustees, he served on a number of important bodies, including the collections committee, board of advisers, and the Art of Europe Visiting Committee, among others.
Travis Andersen of the Globe staff contributed to this report.
Brian MacQuarrie can be reached at brian.macquarrie@globe.com. Malcolm Gay can be reached at malcolm.gay@globe.com. Murray Whyte can be reached at murray.whyte@globe.com.